MetaBrowsing

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories

Metabrowsing is the practice of building a site based on direct data from third party sites. In the simplest form, it can be a set of TransClusions in series. In more complex forms, it can take the form of a "personalized start page" that gloms weather from weather.com, headlines from cnn.com, the daily strip from sluggy.com, etc. Many of the slashboxes on SlashDot are like this.

Another form of metabrowsing are shopping comparison sites, sites that spider secondary sites for their pricing information on similar products and then place the prices for those products next to each other. For instance, say example.com is a book metabrowser. It would spider sites like amazon.com, chapters.ca, fatbrain.com to acquire pricing information on the HarryPotter? books and then list each price in its own catalog.

ticketmaster.com has already won a case against tickets.com, a metabrowser, who was spidering ticketmaster and then DeepLinking directly into ticketmaster.com.

All in all, one of those difficult TransCopyright issues.

Check out the Metabrowser at http://metabrowsing.sprint.net.au. It's that serial kind of metabrowser.

This link is currently (2006/11/10) defunct. But we might find an actual link via Google:MetaBrowser

For a story on EbayDotCom vs. Bidder's Edge, a metabrowser, see http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20000718/tc/the_metabrowsing_fiasco_1.html...

MetaBrowsing

Discussion